Services Overview

Our goal as a consultancy is to help you profit from disruption, and to avoid being hurt by it. In a nutshell, we apply disruption theory to business strategy development to create economic value and strategic growth opportunities.

Whether advising innovators on how to achieve their market disrupting potential, or counseling incumbents on anti-disruption strategies, our aim is the same: to be your "disruption sherpa". We have the knowledge, expertise and experience to guide our clients through unfamiliar territory that often requires counter-intuitive thinking with insightful analysis, targeted education, tactical project support and strategic planning services described below. We'll tackle these difficult problems with you, and work to ensure your success.

We'll help you to:

Understand what disruptive innovation really is, and its root causes

Target the right markets with your solutions

Optimize price strategy

Determine the jobs your target customers want to get done

Develop disruptive go-to-market strategy

Analyze competitive threats and their disruptive potential

Predict where disruption is most likely to come from

Create the best anti-disruption plans specific to your business

Project Guidance Services

Project Guidance

Advisor/Executive Coach to Innovation and Anti-disruption teams

In the advisor/coach role, we become an active member of your team, applying our disruption expertise directly.

Activities include participation in meetings; guidance in the "Disruption by Design" methodology; opportunity and threat assessment and advice on how to respond; product, positioning, segmentation, pricing and JTBD analysis and planning; designing metrics; as well as how-to tactical support. Advisor/Coach assignments are typically contracted on a retainer basis, based on a monthly allocation of time. We are on-call on an as needed basis to advise and assist and guide projects as long as necessary. Call us to discuss your project and get a custom quote.

The Disruption by Design canvas is based on the original Business Model Canvas specified by Osterwalder and Pigneur, but is focused on key differences and risk factors when targeting disruptive innovation as the desired outcome. When designing a Disruption by Design canvas, there are not only different risks and constraints, but a very different approach to discovering and developing opportunities, as described in the book of the same name. We guide you through the process, helping you to remain focused on what the differences are so that a disruptive strategy has a chance to emerge and succeed as a result. Get your project on our calendar.

Disruptive Strategy Services

Disruptive Strategy

Facilitated Disruptive Business Model Design

Similar to Business Model Design Leadership as described above, except our role is to facilitate your creation of a disruptive business model canvas, rather than leading the effort.

We will help you record your existing business model (if you are an established business), brainstorm opportunities, map out hypotheses and assumptions to test, and facilitate your creation of a straw man business model to counter or create disruption. Contact us to discuss your opportunity.

Product/Market Roadmap

Following the methodology laid out in Disruption by Design, we work with you to create your strategic product/market roadmap.

This begins with an audit of any existing plans, analysis of jobs-to-be-done, identification of your disruptive strengths, weaknesses and market opportunities, and prioritization of 'must-have' features. We help you target the right initial segments and the features those target markets require, but rather than a prescriptive plan, create a roadmap showing the alternative paths and dependencies (such as recruitment of early customers, technology hurdles, financial issues, etc.) to enable quick reaction and opportunistic decision making. Tell us about your product opportunity, and request a quotation.

Validation of Product/Market Fit

In general, product/market fit is less of an issue when following the disruption by design methodology, but there may still be tweaking necessary to product features, market positioning, price, distribution strategy, or value proposition to enable your product to reach its disruptive potential.

We help you with early customer development and translation of learnings from the field to your product and marketing strategy and development of a repeatable sales process. In cases where a product or MVP has already been designed, we can assess disruptive potential and help you identify both the best target customers and product tweaks to establish product/market fit, and to role out marketing and sales strategies for general launch. Talk to us about the status of your product, and how we can help.

Acting CMO/Product and Marketing Strategy development

Most small companies, especially those in the range of 10 to 30 employees, have a need for strategic product marketing but lack the resources or talent to do what needs to be done. As Acting CMO, we can fill this critical hole.

Although many startups may feel the need for CMO talent, innovators with disruptive potential need this even more, because of the critical nature of getting positioning, segmentation, pricing, distribution and messaging right. In fact, any one of these done poorly can not only be the difference between disrupting or not disrupting a market, but can sometimes be the difference in survival. We have the perfect solution for companies at this stage of development: hire us to be a 'fractional CMO'. We will dedicate a percentage of our time on a monthly basis to attend meetings, visit with prospective customers, analyze your data, commission JTBD analysis, identify the right target customers, participate with co-founders in key decisions, and help you develop the best go-to-market strategy to maximize disruptive potential. You get the talent and experience of a CMO, at an affordable fraction of the cost, and we'll see you through until you are ready to hire a full time person to fill those shoes. Let's start a conversation to get to know each other and find out whether we are a good solution for your marketing leadership needs.

CEO Coach

In a startup, the CEO is frequently also the chief sales officer, chief marketing officer, chief hiring officer, and/or chief product officer and often needs a backstop, particularly in areas where they may lack experience and knowledge.

Especially in the early days, and with a potential disruptive innovation, having a seasoned executive to bounce ideas off and help advise on disruptive strategy, metrics, customer presentations, sales pitches, partnership opportunities, business modeling, whether to pivot, people issues or any of the myriad things that a CEO has to deal with can be an invaluable support. With our CEO coaching service, we set up a regular weekly time to consult and review what's happened in the last 7 days, and make ourselves available on call on an as-needed basis for the day-to-day issues that come up. You're in charge, but we will guide you and provide counsel on all the critical strategic issues that you will face running a startup with disruptive potential. The most important factor in providing coaching services is mutual respect and knowing that we can get along, so let's start talking.

Anti-Disruption Plan

Companies that are currently facing disruption, or see changes on the horizon that could threaten the viability of product lines, or even the entire business need to act urgently, but they also need to act intelligently.

The wrong anti-disruption strategy can actually accelerate your demise just as much as ignoring the threat. Consider this: what if Blockbuster had offered twice the $50 million dollar price tag that Reed Hastings asked for Netflix in the early 2000's, instead of casting their lot with Enron Broadband Services, or pursuing the purchase of Circuit City for $1 billion just a year before Circuit City went bankrupt? Spending $50 million too much to buy a company that's now worth $39 billion, and which was responsible for putting Blockbuster out of business, would seem like a pretty good decision in retrospect. To come up with an effective anti-disruption strategy, you need to understand what causes disruption, what threats are real and why, and then come up with a plan that addresses the real issues. We work with your innovation or anti-disruption team to help you formulate the right plan and make the decisions that will keep you from ending up like Blockbuster, Kodak, Blackberry, and so many others. Tell us about your project, and ask for a quotation.

Screening tools

If your investment strategy is based on picking probable disruptors, then the key is to accurately identify who those companies are before everyone else does.

Innovative Disruption can help you develop screening tools specific to your investment thesis and the types of companies and industries you like to bet on, increasing your returns many-fold. We can identify likely disruptors with better than 70% effectiveness based just on publicly available data, and with access to inside data and intimate knowledge of their business model and strategy, we can do much better than that. Contact us to discuss your goals, and to determine whether we can help.

Advisory board member

Startup advisory boards need people with a variety of product and market perspectives, and one of the perspectives that most innovative technology companies should have is deep expertise in disruptive innovation, and strategies for intentional disruption.

Education

Primer on Disruption Theory (1/2 day seminar)

Half day introductory seminar covering the basics of disruption theory.

Covers the disruptive innovation model, the proper definition and key concepts, how to distinguish between disruptive and sustaining innovations, low-end vs new-market disruption, how to identify disruptive potential and disruption that is in process or has already happened, predicting disruption, how to be certain that innovation is not disruptive. Reviews example cases to illustrate the common patterns of disruption. Request a date on our calendar for your 'disruption primer'.

Half day introductory seminar focused on what creates disruptive opportunities.

If you've already got a grounding in the basics of disruption theory, you're ready for the next step which is gaining an understanding of the causal factors and how they interrelate to make industries or businesses ripe for disruption. This seminar discusses each of the four conditions which must be present for disruption to occur, and how to apply this knowledge to identify where disruption is likely to come from and why. Innovative Disruption has developed unique expertise in this area, and will provide you with insights you can't get anywhere else -- insights that are essential to identifying real threats and opportunities and for predicting where the disruptor you haven't yet heard of is likely to come from. Schedule your '4 condition' seminar today.

Introduction to Disruptive Innovation (1 day seminar)

This seminar combines the two half day seminars into a comprehensive introduction to disruption theory.

The full day introduction to Disruptive Innovation discusses both the causes (The 4 Necessary + Sufficient Conditions for Market Disruption) and what the model of disruptive innovation looks like (Primer on Disruption Theory). See full description of topics covered in the half day seminars above. Contact us to plan your 'intro to disruption'.

This workshop takes a deeper dive into disruption theory and its application, taking your team through a facilitated discussion of which trends and technologies in your business are relevant and why.

The first day of this two day workshop focuses on the material covered in the full day Introduction to Disruptive Innovation seminar including the key drivers of disruption, followed by a interactive discussion and exploration of trends in your industry, potential disruptive threats and opportunities, important technologies and products and startups that you need to understand, and a drill down of any concepts that are particularly relevant to your business and how to apply them. Get on our schedule for a workshop today.

Facilitated Disruption Workshop - Threats + Strategies Focus (2 days)

This workshop also takes a deeper dive into disruption theory and its application, but is focused on beginning the discussion of an anti-disruption strategy.

On the first day, we begin with the material covered in the full day introduction to Disruptive Innovation seminar, focusing particularly on the causal factors. We continue this exploration on the second day by applying our 4 conditions analysis to a facilitated discussion of specific disruptive threats to your business or industry, and brainstorming of possible strategies to avoid, counter or adapt to disruption. Call to request a date for your workshop.

Disruption Analysis

Analysis projects involve in-depth studies of specific contributing factors to disruption, or of companies and products of specific interest, and our assessment/interpretation of their meaning or significance. The deliverables for all analysis projects include a report, and on-site presentation to discuss the findings and answer questions. We offer the following analyses:

Disruption Report Card - a proprietary score card evaluating the disruptive potential of your business opportunity, including an assessment of disruptive strengths and weaknesses.

JTBD Study - The Job-To-Be-Done study looks either at a specific industry or at a technology, and uncovers the high value "jobs" that potential customers are willing to pay money to get done.

We particularly focus on unique value propositions that differentiate your product based on desired outcomes that are not well-served by existing solutions, and features/jobs that are considered 'must-have' for the target markets. We evaluate the importance of desired outcomes, their economic value, and the degree to which the market is satisfied with alternative solutions to accomplish the same objectives.

Disruptive SWOT Analysis - Based on competitive alternatives (not necessarily in the same product category, but based on JTBD analysis), we perform a standard SWOT analysis through a disruption lens.

A disruptive SWOT analysis evaluates the Strengths and Weaknesses of your solution, with a particular emphasis on Opportunities and Threats. Opportunities and Threats are far more significant in a Disruptive SWOT matrix because that's where the economic value is, and most decisions about disruptive strategy will focus on these two quadrants.

Disruptive Factor Analysis - This report focuses on identifying the key drivers of disruption in an industry/market segment, and possible solutions to address problem areas or leverage opportunities for disruption.

Acquisition Targets - For incumbents, acquiring potentially disruptive solutions can be a key part of an anti-disruption strategy.

We evaluate products and companies based on your product portfolio and where the biggest threats and opportunities are for disruption. We also evaluate which companies in a particular technology domain have the most disruptive potential, and assess the economic value to your organization based on their technology and the potential market. Important to consider is that the economic value, especially of small companies with unique technology solutions, often has no relationship to their book or paper value based on revenues or customer base.

Trend Analysis - A deep dive on macro and micro economic factors and technology trends that impact your markets and which have the potential to spur disruption.

To request any of our Analysis Services, please visit our Contact page, and either give us a call or specify what your needs are, and we'll call you.